Poker of the Soul
by YSPM
Summary: Too lazy to live, and yet too smart to die, and yet I had miraculously managed both by the waning weeks of summer. Except death was not the end, and life not the beginning. Thrust unceremoniously into a new universe without so much as a pamphlet, the spiraling leaves will lead the way home - once more unto the breach. Discontinued.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1: Introduction**

There used to be this running joke in my family that I was too lazy to live but too smart to die, and yet I had miraculously managed both by the waning weeks of summer break. Naturally, I did the first passively and the second accidentally, being altogether too carefree and happy to actually try my hand at either.

I assume so, anyway. I actually don't know how I died.

…Well, that's not quite true.

I _can_ tell you that, as far as I know, my untimely demise had nothing to do with _Naruto_ in any shape or form. I wasn't brained with a volume of _Naruto,_ nor was I assassinated in front of my TV screen while _Naruto_ was playing. I wasn't beaten to death by a crazed Sakura cosplayer, nor was I burned alive by an idiot trying to recreate the Great Fireball Jutsu.

After all, I think I'd remember something like that, and yet I don't: I can't remember a single detail about where I was or what I was doing or even what time it was before I died. Of course, I still remember tons of things about who I am – or, more accurately, was – with startling clarity, even after all these years, but all each memory tells me is that I died after the memory took place.

It's a bit like a dream, really, where you'll end up somewhere but never remember how. And yet I refuse to believe that it was a dream. It was all too vivid, too real. Hurt too much, meant too much, _been_ too much.

The first thing I remember about my life after the Earth That Was, as I've lovingly dubbed my collection of past memories, was the Pressure, like being kidnapped by a vacuum cleaner, compressing me with enough force to turn a human into a grisly water balloon – and _crush_ it.

It hurt. If I'd had a mouth, I would have screamed.

Indeed, had I had been alive, I would have done a lot of things in that scenario I didn't, chief among them determining what killed me. Unfortunately, I was dead, and it's hard to make deductions when you're dead. It's also quite hard to remember exact details.

Returning to my seemingly inane comments about Naruto-related deaths, though, I was reborn, or reincarnated, or whatever the proper terminology is for a situation like this, into the sleepy little ninja village of Konohagakure - the Village Hidden in the Leaves. Had you told me this when I was alive for the first time, I would have (after laughing at you rather rudely) hazarded a guess that I'd be reborn as the son of a Nara, given how I already fit the clan description perfectly. Instead, I found myself reborn on March 9th as a sweet baby girl with no ninjas in the immediate family. My name is Tenten.

Fate, it seems, has a shitty sense of humor.

I never really figured out what my last name was, either, because I didn't spend my childhood with my family. Looking back, I'm sure they probably mentioned my surname at some point when I was dicking around in the crib trying to figure out why my eyesight was shot to hell and why my limbs were stubby and uncoordinated, but in my defense I was somewhat preoccupied.

My parents were fairly decent folk, from what I could tell, even if I only knew them for seven months.

My mom wasn't a smiling woman most of the time, but she always brightened when she saw me. Her round face would split into this crazy grin and her eyes would crinkle up like aluminum foil, and she'd make these sweet cooing noises while I giggled and gurgled under her tickling fingers.

Dad was the opposite, a jovial man who I could tell didn't know how to deal with my sudden intrusion into his life. It wasn't that he didn't love me, because I could see the wonder and delight in his eyes when he snuck furtive glances in at me from the doorway, as if still digesting the fact that he was a father. However, much as his black, bushy beard would quiver with happiness as he held me, the deeply buried panic and confusion at not knowing what to do with me would make itself known in his jerky movements and annoyingly profuse sweating.

Still, I loved my family very much. When it had become clear to me that I had either gone powerfully insane or else swapped places a la Freaky Friday with some girl in Old Timey Japan, I slowly began to replace my old family with my new one. At first, it was the similarities I focused on. That curly beard, the miniature afro on my dad's head. My mom's large eyes, and the way they wrinkled up at the corners just so. The smiles, the mannerisms, the attitudes. I latched on for some semblance of home that I could fill the emptiness in my heart with.

Then, slowly, as if by accident, I learned to love them for who they were. I fell in love that great, booming laugh my old father would have never been capable of pulling off. I grew attached to my new father's clumsiness, to how he would rinse the counter when he used the sink, to how my mother would scold him for it, and to how they would kiss passionately in forgiveness afterwards. After seven long months of confusion and heartache, I had grown to feel that maybe the hollowness in my chest was finally filling up once more.

Then, after those seven months, at once all too long and yet far too short, the Kyūbi struck, and my mom, visiting relatives on the other side of the village at the time, was killed along with her side of the family when their house collapsed on them.

The next day, my dad took me to the orphanage, his eyes red-rimmed with grief and regret, and told them my name. Even with my limited vocabulary, I could listen well enough to know that my mom had somehow been killed. When they asked for a last name, he simply shook his head and told them that I was better off not knowing, and that they should tell me that he, too, had died in the attack.

Those were the last words I ever heard him say, and I understood enough to know that. I yelled and screamed for him not to abandon me, but with my vocal cords underdeveloped as they were, all that he heard was babbling and a series of childish wails.

Dad, after all, had never been all that skilled at understanding what I wanted when I cried.

I can't pretend not to judge him, to hate him for what he did to me - hate him just as much as I love him. I know, on an intellectual level, that he must have had his reasons. Perhaps they were financial, and my father simply didn't have the money to properly raise a child alone after our house was halfway destroyed. Insurance, after all, didn't exist in Konoha, because questions of massive property damage were more often opened with a "how often" than a "how likely." On the other hand, perhaps he left me in the orphanage because he wasn't strong enough, and couldn't bear such a powerful reminder of his deceased wife staring him down with far-too-intelligent eyes for the next twenty years. Maybe he just didn't think himself emotionally capable of raising a child.

Or perhaps he simply hated my guts just as much as I couldn't stop myself hating his.

I never would find out, even though the pain of abandonment and loss dulled with time, slowly replaced by simmering resentment and a kind of dark curiosity.

Partially to distract myself from that initial gut-wrenching pain, though, I devoted my first two or three years at the orphanage to re-learning all the basic functions of a human being. You see, in my second infancy, I had managed to forget everything I had learned on the Earth That Was, from proper bowel control to how to walk. I guess I did have a new brain and a new body, so it did make some modicum of sense - not that it was any less embarrassing when I shat myself on a daily basis.

I kept crying to a minimum, except when I had to get my milk. I had myself potty-trained after about eighteen months, with only one incident of myself accidentally falling into the toilet bowl and needing to be lifted out by an older child. Learning to speak and write the language was harder, as my vocal cords and motor skills were undeveloped and I had never tried to learn Japanese before, but with some concentrated effort I was speaking in short phrases by around fifteen months or so.

(Naturally, I ensured that my first word was 'fuck', if only for the bragging rights I'd have years down the line.)

The simple task of learning how to function like a normal human being occupied me pretty well for around two or three years. It also kept me reasonably happy, but an unfortunate side-effect of it all was that everybody seemed to think I was some kind of prodigy.

Additionally, in my information-gathering endeavors, I came across some rather shocking information. When I was two-and-a-half, I decided I had become biologically old enough to ask the matron about my parents without arousing any suspicion. As cutely as I could manage (since I had been practicing, of course), I looked up at her and asked, "Where's mommy?"

There was a horribly dull pang in my chest as I voiced the question, but I shoved it ruthlessly aside for the sake of information; while I understood that my mom had died, I had never been told why.

Something in her gaze softened at the sight of me and she crouched to face me, sighing resignedly. "Your mommy is dead, sweetie."

That was something I both liked and disliked about Konoha, even though I had no idea that it was Konoha at the time. Because they had no compunctions about training six-year-old kids like Itachi into ruthless, emotionless killers and then tossing them out to fight grown men, the matron saw nothing wrong with telling me that my parents were dead. Death was, after all, practically commonplace in the ninja world, fickle as the weather and unchanging as the climate.

I made sure to widen my eyes at that, however, and act like I was emotionally effected and surprised by 'learning' about the death of my mother. "Why?"

She tried to smile at me comfortingly, but her lips were pressed together too harshly for her expression to be anything but a grimace. I could tell she liked this line of questioning as little as I did. "She was visiting relatives in the village when a big demon fox showed up and attacked. The Fourth Hokage defeated it, but not before she died."

Something tugged at the back of my mind with this statement. Up until this point, I had no idea that I was in the Narutoverse and not Old Japan. Yes, I'd seen men and women walking around with forehead protectors, but it wasn't like those were specific to the Narutoverse, and although easily recognizable landmarks like the Hokage Monument were in plain view, I had never really been outside for long anywhere near them. What little I'd heard about ninjas and samurai was easily dismissible, considering where I thought I was, and the presence of sinks and other fairly modern amenities clearly meant I hadn't been studying my history hard enough.

However, this response about a demon fox and a fourth fire shadow seemed almost too coincidental. "A demon fox?" I asked in response.

"Yes. We called it the Kyūbi. It was bigger than a mountain, had nine tails, and was pure evil." She paused, and then continued again, something in her face twitching as she said, "It's dead now."

Reeling from the revelation but dedicated not to draw suspicion upon myself, I asked, "And where's daddy?"

She looked like she was swallowing something bitter as she said, "Daddy is…Daddy is dead, like mommy. Now run along and play sweetie; I've got to meet with some important people in a little bit."

I nodded meekly and ran off to my bed, where I threw myself under the covers. Thinking furiously, I tried to process all the information. No matter which way I rationalized it or how hard I tried to deny it, I simply couldn't ignore the logical conclusion.

I had been reborn into the Narutoverse - or I had gone powerfully insane.

Years four and five in the Narutoverse, when I started taking classes at the public school, were fairly uneventful. I held most of the top scores in my classes, although it was hardly fair considering how old I actually was. Honestly, I probably would have shot for the halfway spot, only the matron was convinced of my genius by then and I had to keep up appearances. It was just a bonus that this gave me a pass for when I spent long hours in the library doing thinly-veiled research on the history and science of the ninja world, trying to grasp what I was up against.

Judging by my age and the date of the Kyūbi attack, I was seven months and one day older than Naruto, which implied I was born into the class just before the Rookie Nine. This, coupled with my first name and lack of a surname, solidified in my mind that I was not just any Tenten, but _the_ Tenten of the Konoha Twelve.

With that in mind, I turned to practicing my chakra in preparation for the trials to come. To my immense surprise, however, it took me a while longer than I'd expected to learn how to use it, even without a teacher of any kind. I had basically no idea how to call it up for around a month, after which I made a stunning revelation.

I wanted to punch myself for not having deduced it before; it was just _so obvious _once I just thought about it. Why, in the series, did most people always talk about _feeling_ chakra and not, say, smelling it? Why did Karin keep talking about how warm or cold other peoples' chakra was? Why did people talk about the density of chakra, or of how intense and heavy it was? The answer was simple: Chakra sense was an _actual sense_, with specialized nerves dedicated to it - and it _had_ to work through the skin, for it to be comparable to pressure- and temperature-based sensations. In other words, just like with taste and smell, I had likely been mistaking my chakra sense for my sense of touch the entire time.

See, the thing about taste and smell is that, since both rely on fairly similar chemoreceptors, both can be influenced heavily by one another. Without the sense of smell, for example, bacon is little more than a mouthful of salt.

Going with the premise that chakra sense was similar in mechanics somehow to thermoreception and pressure-based mechanoreception, I tried to think of sensations which had been out of place in my new life and quickly realized that I had been unbearably hot during my entire stay in Konoha, though I had gotten used to it with time. It wasn't a hard leap from there to figure out how to sense chakra from people.

See, other peoples' chakra is easy to sense, because their chakra always somehow different from yours, which you normally feel. Its unique signature, as I quickly deduced, will make it feel hot or cold, humid or dry, and heavy or light relative to yours as you move closer to the source. Your chakra, additionally, has the opposite effect on other people – if somebody's chakra feels cool to you, then yours will come off as warm to them.

(Of course, there were other factors – to highly skilled sensor ninja, texture was often important, for example – but those were the most easily accessible.)

On the other hand, It's always harder for you to sense your own chakra, because of desensitization: prolonged exposure to stimulus results in diminished response to and awareness of that stimulus. Essentially, because I was always feeling my own chakra, I couldn't tell it was there anymore, and I was unable to draw it out. In order to use it, I had to look up a number of exercises which would cause my chakra to fluctuate madly. Between the oscillating highs and lows of chakra output I'd be able to eventually feel the difference and use that to tug on my chakra.

And wouldn't you know it; once I figured out how to feel my chakra suddenly everything came much easier to me.

Much to my dismay, however, when I started refining my awareness of chakra well enough to compare myself with other kids, I realized pretty quickly that I was probably mediocre at best in terms of talent. My chakra reserves weren't much larger than the other civilian kids around me, and although they grew steadily with constant practice, in the Academy I'd have below-average reserves. My control helped balance things out, since I was able to feel and direct my chakra with a little more ease than most, but I knew I would always tire a little faster than I was comfortable with. As if to make things worse, my physical capabilities were only about average, too, and unlike Rock Lee I was simply way too lazy to throw myself into hardcore training until I collapsed every day. Plus, I refused to wear a green jumpsuit and I probably couldn't ever open the Eight Gates the way he could, so taijutsu specialization was out. Then, as if the final nail in the coffin, my civilian parentage meant I probably had no bloodline limits or clan jutsus stored away anywhere.

I was, in short, completely unremarkable.

I strongly considered not taking part in the events of the Naruto storyline, to be honest. Before, it had seemed like a foregone conclusion, from the moment I looked up my birthdate, glanced in a mirror, and realized that yes, I _was_ Tenten. After realizing my mediocrity, however, I started to wonder if I should really become a ninja at all. If I wasn't skilled enough, then even the little day-to-day details of being a ninja would be life-threatening.

Then again, I realized it was just as dangerous, if not more so, not knowing how to defend myself at all in a village that would get attacked twice by S-ranked ninja (thrice, if you counted the one that claimed my mother's life) by the time I'd have reached legal driving age on the Earth-That-Was. And, somehow, I felt that self-study just wasn't going to cut it with these guys.

And that's not even getting _into_ the whole Infinite Tsukuyomi debacle, or the fact that my simple insistence on avoiding the storyline could have tons of negative repercussions I wouldn't even be aware of until they were irreversible.

For example, what if Team Gai failed their team exam after they graduated from the academy because they didn't have me on their team, and got sent back to the academy? What if, as a result, Neji and Lee were weaker, and their new sensei a year later didn't let them take part in the Chunin Exams? Or, even worse, what if they _did_ take part but got killed because of their incompetence and were therefore unable to be involved in any future story events?

And those were just the pre-timeskip possibilities.

With all those things in mind, I realized I pretty much had no choice but to join the academy, as the alternative was risking the apocalypse via the absence of any number of contrived coincidences.

Early on, I noticed that my greatest assets would be my raw intellect and my early head start, both of which would hopefully compensate for my relatively underwhelming physical talent.

I would have to be like Shikamaru, who was, despite his general bodily mediocrity, able to out-think and subdue Hidan, an S-ranker who took effectively no damage from any hits and could kill with a mere glancing blow.

Unlike my peers, I would also be able to research heavily academic technique branches like sealing and medical jutsu when they were focusing on which way to point their kunai while they ran. I was fairly confident about this - in my past life, I'd been pretty damn smart, if I do say so myself. I even took a bunch of college classes as a high schooler, mostly in math, finishing Elementary Differential Equations the summer I died. Granted, I was no Einstein or anything, but collegiate mathematics training does bring with it a number of advantages - creativity, critical thinking, pattern recognition, problem solving, the ability to tackle a situation from multiple angles, a penchant for rigorous analysis... The list goes on. Who knew that learning how to apply eigenvalues and eigenvectors to systems of ordinary differential equations would prepare you for being a ninja?

Well, maybe that's stretching it somewhat, but I did also get something of an intelligence upgrade when I transferred realities. I guess it sort of made sense, since I had a new brain even with the same soul, although I was entirely clueless about how the biology of that played out. Maybe the mind is like a bridge between the soul and the body, and therefore a better brain allows for more efficient interplay and clearer thought? Everything I could come up with just sounded asinine to me, really, since I hadn't even believed in souls (or anything metaphysical, for that matter) until I was reincarnated anyway. Still, whatever the case may be, and whether I was simply born smarter or my brain developed more through constant use in childhood, I definitely got a boost. Old mathematical concepts I'd been struggling with suddenly made much more sense to me. Lots of the names, dates, and places were new to me, but I hardly ever forgot any of them. I had to relearn lots of anatomy and biology due to the physiological differences in the people of this universe, but, surprisingly, it came to me way easier than old biology ever had. Hell, I even found myself enjoying Japanese, a language I would have never dreamed of tackling in my old life.

All in all, I tried not to question it too much. It was just nice to have something go completely _right_ for me when I was born clanless and unremarkable, and I planned on taking full advantage the little boosts I got.

At the age of six, I took the entrance exam to the Academy, and with two years of preparation it was hardly surprising that I passed. In fact, I had _over_ prepared, even going so far as to spend a month tackling the transformation technique when I would have likely passed without any prior training at all. Imagine my surprise when I showed up and was informed that an applicant need only:

1\. Love the village and hope to preserve peace and prosperity.

2\. Have a mind that will not yield, able to endure hard training and work.

3\. Be healthy in mind and body.

In order to pass the first and second, we pretty much had to make a pledge and understand that failure to comply with either of the conditions could easily result in our immediate expulsion from the Academy. The third required a psychological and physical examination from a medical ninja.

I didn't even break a sweat.

When I returned to the orphanage that day with my test results, I immediately broke the happy news to the matron. Given that we lived in a society where skilled ninjas were glorified on roughly the same level as presidents and prime ministers, and with higher incomes to boot, I fully expected her to clap in delight and sign me up for the academy first thing next morning. To my great surprise, though, she completely refused to let me get within a mile of the place for as long as I stayed in the orphanage.

Years and years ago, before the Kyūbi attack, I would have considered heeding her advice. After all, she was a very kind woman, and since I had unwillingly abandoned my first mother and my second had died on me, she was the closest thing I'd had to a mom in years. However, losing all semblance of a family twice in under a year had taught me not to let people get too close to me in this world, and so I had no compunctions with excusing myself from the orphanage to go live on my own.

The only problem was that, being an orphan and all, I had pretty much no income, and I had saved up very little money over the years. Using a transformation to disguise my age and gender, I took out a couple small loans from the shadier assholes who didn't ask for legal identification - basically enough to keep me afloat for a month or two, until I could find a way to get my own income - and then moved into the cheapest apartment I could stomach, a tiny little run-down thing with just a bedroom and a bathroom.

In the Red Light district.

Konoha is a wonderful village full of wonderful people, but even it has its dark spots. The Red Light district is one of them, the kind of place that you always imagine shrouded in the inky blackness of nighttime, with cigarette smoke twisting lazily through the air and drunken shouts emanating from every half-opened door, the flickering lights from inside casting sharp reliefs on the unkempt streets. The whole place was, rather fittingly, located almost as far away from the Hokage Monument as possible, where the village leaders couldn't easily watch over it, symbolically or otherwise. However, due to the depreciated property values stemming from extra crime and unsavory businesses, I was able to snag an acceptable apartment for a much more affordable price than normal.

Don't get me wrong, I knew the dangers when I rented the apartment, but I also knew that I could likely scare off most muggers and rapists by transforming into assorted leaf chunin (jonin rank being too suspicious). Besides, after a year or two at the Academy, I'd probably become skilled enough to take on most of the drunken idiots dumb enough to mug a ninja.

It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't terrible either, and it was no more risky than any of the other shit I'd likely be doing in a few years. Besides, I couldn't really afford much else without a solid income.

So with that taken care of, I was basically set for the Academy.

Plot, here I come.

* * *

A/N: So there you have it: chapter one of my obligatory self-insert. Well, if I'm being precise and honest, I can't _really_ call it a self-insert, because if I were actually in Tenten's shoes I'd be just freaking out and fucking up on so many levels. This Tenten, because of that, is really more an idealized (and feminized, for obvious plot reasons) version of myself, so that the important base elements are all there, but she's way more mentally suited to her role than I would have ever been. To quote Topher Brink, I "wove more than one thread of unflappable in there." Now, that being said, this version of Tenten still does share her Earth That Was backstory with me, so you can think of her as a self-insert with Hero Upgrades.

For now.

Tenten as a character will be similar to her canon portrayal, but not the same. For example, I've introduced lodgings in the Red Light district to connect to her dependence on weapons, as she'll need them to defend herself earlier against the bigger and stronger opponents in the area. However, because she has the advantage of knowing all the weaknesses in the original Tenten's abilities (her lack of adaptability, her low penetrative power, her lack of prominent tactical variety), this Tenten will be likely only borrowing a few aspects of the original's combat style. You'll get more details on that later, though, because I'm not in the mood to spoil anything right now.

If you squint carefully, you may notice one or two details just ever so slightly off. They'll look like plot holes at first, but they aren't: I'll be covering them in the future. Most likely towards the very end of the fic. Consider this a bread crumb on the trail to the true nature of Tenten's reincarnation.

The title will probably make sense later.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. Because this is my first fanfiction, I'm using this chapter as more of a trial run than anything else. Future chapters will be meatier and more important. I appreciate all reviews, as they help me decide how to change and improve upon my writing style.

\- YSPM


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 1: Welcome to the Academy!**

On the first day of the academy, I woke up at 5:00, sharp, and proceeded to roll lethargically out of bed. Lazily applying a transformation jutsu to look like a grumpy Bruce Willis (as John McClane) in a chunin vest, I wandered sleepily outside to a yakitori stall I'd spied on the other side of the apartment. The prices weren't great, and neither was the food, but it would last me until I could find a cheaper, cleaner place in the more shinobi-dense areas of the village to regularly buy food at.

After completing my purchase, I ducked back into my apartment to polish off my breakfast. Most minor transformation jutsus can make you appear taller, but few will physically increase your height, so when you eat it looks like you're shoveling food directly through your illusory body. In all honesty, it's not something I would normally do in public.

Anyway, with my morning meal digesting, I headed out to the academy.

I quickly realized on the way, however, that the main downside to living in the Red Light district of Konoha was not actually the crime or the prostitution. No, the worst part was that it was as far away from the Academy as physically possible. Seriously – the Academy was pressed right up against the Hokage Monument, while my apartment was on the other side of the village from that.

Normally, traversing Konoha wouldn't have been too much of a bother with the use of chakra, except that I was six, and six-year-olds do not tend to have very much in the way of leg strength or stamina. By the time I arrived three and a half hours later, I was drenched in sweat and I had already missed half of the Hokage's welcoming speech. A few parents turned their noses up at me in disapproval, but I was too exhausted to care.

As an upside, I supposed that having to run twenty or so miles every day would at least improve my speed and stamina to acceptable levels.

Looking around, I scanned the crowd for familiar faces. God, there were a lot of brats here - only one class was ever shown in the anime, but there appeared to be enough kids for at least three. What was the collective noun for brats, anyway? Was it annoyance? I mean, 'an annoyance of brats' at least fits nicer than 'a murder of crows' or 'a litter of cats'.

Finding myself rapidly growing bored with my observations on bratdom, I shifted my gaze up to Sarutobi Hiruzen. As I examined him more closely, I found myself somewhat surprised by his appearance; I knew he was renowned as a God among shinobi, but he looked more like some kid's grandfather here, hunched over ever so slightly, with a warm, benevolent smile creasing his face like mistreated paperwork. If it weren't for the hat, I wouldn't have known who he was at all.

I supposed the apparent effects of old age (wrinkles and other actual effects notwithstanding) were in all likelihood intended to ingratiate him with the citizens and make potential assassins and enemies underestimate him. It certainly gave me some cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile the God of Shinobi with the slow, wizened man standing before me.

His speech, which finally seemed to be drawing to a close, was a generic formal welcome into the world of ninja. It was fairly good, too, although I suspected heavily that it was recycled.

After he finished and applause filled the yard, three instructors clambered onto the stage and started calling names for their classes. As their names were called, the students assembled into lines before their corresponding instructors. I recognized none of them.

After the first one had finished and led his charges inside, the second began to read off her list, and a horrifying thought occurred to me.

I hadn't really given any thought to it before, but I realized with a shock quite belatedly that I might not even make it into Lee's and Neji's class. If the class selection process wasn't based on, say, the alphabetical order of the applicants' names, I could have easily changed something miniscule and ended up in a different class. It was a terrifying thought: the butterfly effect dictated that my absence from the plot would send everything spiraling out of control, and all it took was a stray shuriken, or a slow reaction, or an ambitionless chunin somewhere shutting his eyes and jabbing a half-chewed pen at his unmarked class roster.

I had a sudden and powerful appreciation for just how out of my depth I was.

In this instance, it hadn't mattered how much I had trained myself, or how smart or dedicated I had become, or how much foreknowledge I had amassed in anticipation of the storyline. For all my preparation and planning, I could not look over all the contingencies without overlooking at least a few, as well. Something as simple and stupid as class rosters could have just ended the world – and worse, I hadn't even considered the possibility until it was too late.

Thankfully, as it so turned out, we did all end up together under the care of a half-retired chunin who looked like she felt way too old for this shit, but the realization of how narrowly I'd just dodged a bullet still made me grit my teeth. In this second life, I wouldn't just be out of my depth; I would be constantly on the verge of drowning _and I wouldn't even fucking know how._

Calm. _Down_.

I clenched my fists and followed some Takaku brat into the academy, our grizzled war veteran instructor boredly lecturing on the locations of various classrooms and restrooms and whatnot as we crawled along. I barely bothered to pay attention - I'd have the layout down after I'd gotten lost in it once or twice, anyway.

The class apparently had the usual ratio of one girl per every two guys, so that was good. We'd likely be split into teams of the same ratio, which meant that (as long as Lee barely passed and Neji blew away the competition) canon Team Gai would still end up together as the yearly rookie-of-the-year/top kunoichi/dead last team. Then, I just had to make sure Lee caught Gai's eye so he would request us together, and canon consistency would be preserved. As long as nothing else popped out of the blue to surprise me.

We settled into a small classroom and our instructor introduced herself as Kato Momoe, before launching into a surprisingly standard first day procedure. We were each given a textbook on chakra control, which we had to write our names on, as well as a rule sheet and a bunch of name tags.

Thankfully, though, the basic, introductory stuff ended there and Kato-sensei got to the exciting stuff.

Namely, she handed out a pre-test for us to complete on ninja history and various skills we'd need to know before graduation. I wanted to facepalm. Thus far, the Ninja Academy was completely failing to live up to expectations.

I finished the pre-test fairly quickly and started looking around. There were a few questions I had to pause and consider, mostly dealing with stealth procedures and protocol during infiltration, but for the most part it was incredibly simple. I could see that many students shared the same opinion – Neji, for example, had finished the test ages ago and was sitting patiently in his chair. There was also a black-haired brat I identified as an Uchiha by the Uchiwa on his clothes looking supremely bored and unimpressed with his completed test, and a spiky-haired Nara who'd finished within five minutes and was now sleeping on his desk.

Well, either that or he'd skipped the test entirely and just gone straight to the sleeping part. Honestly, it was kind of a toss-up.

Other students, though, were either still working or had given up. Some chubby kid I'd initially pegged for an Akimichi (before I noticed the lack of markings on his cheeks) was just staring at the test stone-facedly, his pencil hand twitching slightly every few seconds or so. Contrastingly, Lee was having a minor mental breakdown in his seat, tearing at his ponytail and making these weird, tortured noises in the back of his throat, like a mix between a boiling teapot and a cat spitting out a hairball. If it weren't so pitiful, it'd almost be adorable.

Sighing, I slumped over on my desk and nestled my face into my arms. There was likely a physical pre-test after this, if they actually wanted to get a grasp on our abilities, so I figured I might as well use the remaining time to catch up on the sleep I'd missed waking up at 5:00 in the morning.

Ten minutes later, Kato-sensei collected all the exam papers, cleared her throat, and launched into yet another standard speech comforting all the people who'd failed: "This test is intended as a basic gauge of your prior experience with ninja rules, customs, and protocol. If you don't think you did well, don't feel too discouraged; your scores will not be placed in your permanent records and plenty of students before you have utterly failed this test and then gone on to become splendid ninja." She sounded more bored than comforting, like she'd given this speech a hundred times in the past, but somehow that was a bit better. After all, if she gave the impression that she'd actually seen other students fail the test, it lended credence to her claim about their future successes.

Continuing, she announced a physical pre-test which would gauge our general skills and give us an idea of how we compared with the rest of the class. Shocker. She ushered us out of the classroom in single-file and led us through the winding halls back outside to a fair-sized field behind the building. There, in alphabetically selected groups of five, we ran laps around the field until she told us to stop and switch off. From there, we moved on to pushups and various muscle exercises. As a seasoned fighter, she was likely able to quickly and efficiently determine our capabilities from just watching us.

It became apparent quickly to me that I was even more behind than I'd anticipated. In everything – stamina, speed, strength, flexibility – I was probably somewhere around thirtieth percentile, behind even _Lee_. Frankly, it was embarrassing; I'd clearly been letting my laziness hold me back if I wasn't even capable of outrunning the resident weakling of the class, or for that matter half the kids that literally wouldn't last a day on their genin squads.

I'd have to throw myself into training more seriously, I resolved. Fuinjutsu, ninjutsu, taijutsu, and physical conditioning would do me well for a few years until I could at least hold my own against the upper echelons of the class.

After we'd all finished, Kato-sensei told us that we'd head back to the class and begin a lesson on safety procedures as boring as they were basic. By the time we had finished and broken for lunch, our comprehensive course on how not to kill ourselves had taken up two hours of our time. Somewhere around the eightieth minute, I briefly considered disobeying instructions and actually killing myself, both to spite Kato-sensei for putting me through the lesson and also to escape my boredom. Thankfully, that urge didn't last long.

During lunch, we returned to the ground floor again, in an area set aside for six-year-olds, and ate the lunches we (should have) brought to class. I'd kind of forgotten to prepare mine, but I figured I could just grab a snack later in the day.

To occupy myself as I waited out the rest of lunch, though, I started exploring the school. We had nearly thirty minutes, anyway, and it wasn't like I'd be missed.

The Academy as a location was much larger than strictly necessary for the training of young ninja, partially because the Hokage's office and related bureaucratic sites were situated atop of it, and partially because the Academy training grounds were located all around it. In order to protect the building from stray shuriken and flailing limbs, the patch of land the Academy was on had been expanded, providing a buffer of trees and empty space between the building and the practicing students. Despite this, pockmarks lined the white-and-orange walls, souvenirs of badly timed throws and the occasional burst of frustration. Kunai were there, too – battered and rusty, hiding within the copses of trees or resting in branches too high for kids practicing alone to reach. It kind of reminded me of the filthy tennis balls I'd find in the bushes at my old school on the Earth That Was. Aching, shapeless memories enveloped me, forcing my lips into a fond smile.

Nostalgia seemed my only constant companion over the years. It wandered the way a crow walked – jerky and unpredictable, hopping from topic to topic like scraps of food or bits of glass. Sometimes, it afforded them only brief inspection, a cursory glance that served mainly as a reaffirmation to the existence of the past, before moving on. Other times, it swallowed them whole.

This time, I found myself thinking about my family. Tennis used to be a bonding activity for us, and while none of us were really all too serious about it I'd often find it permeating the house in strange ways. The welcome mat, for example, was tennis-themed, as were the decorations hanging from the rusty chandelier left behind by our home's previous inhabitants. Tennis bags and cans of balls cluttered the space in front of the shoe rack, which itself was lined with various sizes and colors of tennis shoes. It was a weekly thing for my mom and me, a ritual we performed to maintain our closeness, as well as a source of exercise and entertainment on the slow Saturday mornings when we both had a chance to relax. For my dad, it was a social event which he used to compete and connect with new, interesting people.

I probably would've continued reminiscing about old family events for the rest of lunch, but my introspection was cut short by the nearing sounds of shuffling and muffled yelps. Disgruntled, I shoved myself off the ground (and that was curious, for when exactly did I sit down?) and snuck over to around the nearest corner.

I suppose I expected to see Lee getting bullied or something similarly plot-relevant, but amusingly enough that wasn't the case. Instead, I managed to wander into the middle of a friendly spar between upperclassmen.

Specifically, I managed to wander into the path of a stray kunai tossed during a friendly spar. If I had any thoughts at all as I stood there with a knife flashing before my eyes, they were as follows: _I know I said this could all end with a stray shuriken, but somehow I never actually expected it to happen._

As my good luck would have it, though, children are generally not entrusted with real shuriken when trying to fake-murder each other. This is largely due to the pressing danger of them actually murdering each other.

As my bad luck would have it, though, there was still a chunk of metal headed directly for my forehead. Additionally, I did not have a forehead protector.

When I came to, I was lying on the ground with a couple older children crowding around me and a teacher rushing over. Moaning slightly, I sat up and rubbed my head. "What happened?" I asked to nobody in particular.

Nobody in particular answered me.

"Hello?" asked the teacher, a slightly nervous-looking man with rumpled clothes and thick glasses. "Are you the girl who got hit in the forehead with a kunai?"

"Mmm. I think?" I said. "I'm not really sure…" My voice trailed off hesitantly as I considered.

"Oh, dear. Hold still," he instructed, before he placed one hand on my forehead and made a single hand seal with the other. "Contusion, concussion… Not too bad. Just give me a minute."

My vision suddenly went green and I blinked rapidly, trying to clear away whatever had gotten in my eyes, before I realized that the green light was coming from the teacher's hands. Slowly, the fuzziness on my thoughts lifted, and I realized that he was using a medical jutsu on me.

He finished and stepped away, exhaling, and I patted my forehead to examine the remaining damage. It didn't even hurt.

"Cool," I breathed.

He grinned. "That was a medical jutsu. Keep studying and you might learn some, too." I couldn't quite restrain the smirk that curled onto my face.

When we returned to class, nobody mentioned my absence during lunch, which was good. I didn't really want to stand out too much and get drawn into the drama of prepubescent killers-in-training.

Well, I think Kato-sensei did look at me a little funny, but that could've just been my imagination.

Anyway, the rest of the lesson was the basics of chakra control, which I had self-studied. Really, other than a couple minor technicalities, there wasn't anything too new in the lesson. Bored, I slipped into a daze and contemplated the future of my education: _Are all my days at the Academy really going to be this dull?_

Unfortunately, Kato-sensei did not provide an answer.

* * *

After class, I decided to make the most of my excursion to the other side of the village, and so I headed off to the genin library to look up jutsu for my own unique combat style.

While the genin library was, of course, open only to genin and above ranked ninja, the security on it was a joke because nothing important was stored there anyway. Anything enemy ninja might be after was stashed away in other, much more secretive libraries, and so the only reason security existed was to keep random people from learning ninjutsu and taking missions that would otherwise go to Konoha. The only other people who might sneak in were Academy students like me, but we were already affiliated with the Konoha military, so there was no real reason to go to great lengths keeping us out.

Because of this, the guards posted were generally genin or low-ranking chunin forced to take D-ranks as punishment, and one only needed a good disguise and a swiped ID card to fool them - the week it took me was honestly far too long.

Once inside, I started browsing for good jutsu books to help me develop my fighting style.

I had given my fighting style a lot of thought over the past couple years, and had decided upon something both unique and effective that likely only I could properly pull off, due to my head start. Since I wanted to play to my strengths, I would use either fuinjutsu or (squee) medical jutsu, both of which required high intelligence. Medical jutsu, though, much as I wanted to use it, required a teacher and lots of resources due to the sheer amount of live practice required and the drastic consequences in the event of failure, so that was out until I got old enough to ask for tutelage. Until then, fuinjutsu would be the best idea, as it seemed simpler to practice and better suited for combat.

Besides, it was far closer to the original Tenten's combat style.

However, unless I only used storage seals like the original Tenten did, fuinjutsu required that I be actually capable of applying my seals in the midst of combat. Even if I figured out how to draw seals without ink and brush the way the Fourth Hokage did, applying them with the tap of a finger and a twist of chakra, I would still likely be limited to traps. Dropping seals on my opponents' skin, weapons, and clothing required a certain taijutsu superiority I probably wouldn't have.

Thus, in my scenario, being able to use my seals long-range would be best. However, applying seals to tags, wrapping tags around kunai, and then throwing the kunai took far too long for it to be a staple of my fighting style. It also limited the extent of my long-range sealing to the number of kunai I carried. Shadow clones and shadow shuriken could improve that number, but with my average reserves, regular use of those techniques wouldn't be possible by any stretch of the imagination.

Thus, I had to be able to apply the seals directly to whatever I threw, cutting down the usage time, and I had to make them far more portable so that I could carry hundreds of them. It took me about a week before the flash of inspiration struck me.

Instead of applying tags to shuriken and then throwing the shuriken, why not just make the tags themselves throwable – like cards? If I got the right blacksmith to make them for me, I could carry multiple decks of fully lethal throwing cards, all of which I could seal things into by simply touching the faces.

Best of all, I'd look fucking awesome with a combat style like that. I mean, card wielder is practically synonymous with devious, roguish badass – just look at Gambit, or Hisoka, or Twisted Fate.

The only problem was that I, at the tender age of six, didn't have the money to custom order a hundred steel throwing cards with razor-sharp edges, so I had to be able to find my own way of making the cards. I toyed for another week with the idea of carving out wooden cards until I could buy metal ones, but that would take ages for each card – I tried it and found out firsthand. It made me wish desperately that I had been born with mokuton so that I could just grow my own cards. Unfortunately, wishing did not give me any such abilities, but it gave me another flash of inspiration.

I couldn't use Wood Release, sure, but that wasn't the only way of using ninjutsu to create physical objects. What if I used doton?

Doton, or Earth Release, would allow me to shape the earth itself into throwable cards that I could also apply seals to. Since the earth was essentially ubiquitous, the number of cards I could make would scale rather nicely with my chakra capacity, and my practice with doton would also allow me to reshape the battlefield itself. I could build walls, spikes, gates, and anything else I needed to force my opponents to move one way and not another – a valuable skill when using fuinjutsu traps.

Thus, I had to figure out what kind of jutsu I could use to create a card out of the earth, which was why I had come to the library. My skills at elemental manipulation weren't anywhere near developed enough to create my own jutsu, so I'd likely have to take another one and modulate the power and size until I ended up creating a card.

I pulled a booklet of Earth Ninjutsu off a shelf. Flipping through, I glanced over the techniques I could use. Earth Release: Earth Flow River was discarded, as was Earth Release: Hardening Jutsu and the Rock Golem Jutsu, although I resolved to consider the latter once I acquired enough chakra. It would be interesting to apply seals to my own personal golem bodyguard and send it lumbering after enemies, only to explode it or shock them on contact. On top of that, I could use it as a movable melee shield while I rained hellfire with my sealing cards from afar.

After around twenty minutes of searching, I found the perfect technique: the Earth Wall Jutsu.

Effectively, my idea was this: I would bastardize the Earth Wall Jutsu to push card-sized walls from the earth with enough force to send them into my hands, where they could then stored, sealed, or thrown with reckless abandon.

The hand seals were simple, as were the mechanics; it seemed that the ranking was more for the chakra cost than anything else. Considering how small a wall I wished to create, that would probably lower the ranking to around a D or a C.

Tiger started it off, which made sense, as it seemed from the jutsus in the scroll to be a common hand seal for beginning Earth Style techniques, likely because it helped with the shaping. After all, Fire Style jutsus, which built up the chakra inside the body first and then molded it into a specific form as it was expelled, tended to have the Tiger seal last. Earth Style jutsus, on the other hand, reversed the order, picking the area of earth you wished to affect and then infusing it with chakra so you could control it. Naturally, the order of seals would also be reversed. Snake, interestingly enough, wasn't used, despite being common with Earth Release jutsus. It seemed that Dog was substituted instead, with Hare and Boar providing motion and power, respectively.

Shutting the booklet and placing it back upon the shelf, I ran a hand through my short hair tiredly and glanced at the clock. I had around an hour and a half before I had to start walking home, so that gave me some time to head over to the wooded area of a nearby park, where I could work in solitude.

About ten minutes later when I arrived at a secluded area, I squatted near the ground and meditated briefly, feeling around within myself for the warmth of chakra. Grabbing hold of it, I set my hands in the first seal, Tiger, simultaneously injecting my chakra into the earth. In a normal Earth Style Wall, one would imbue a volume of earth the size and shape of the intended wall with chakra, but since I only wanted to raise a card out of the ground, I tried to mould the shape and size accordingly. Once I was reasonably satisfied, I moved on to the next seal, Hare. Screwing up my face with concentration, I readied my chakra to lift the earth up. Then, setting my hands in a Boar seal, I pumped in chakra until I felt I had hardened the correct patch of earth enough that it would separate cleanly from the surrounding dirt. After a slight moment of hesitation where I tried to remember how to form Dog, I curled my right hand into a fist with the back facing up and placed my open left palm on top of it.

"Earth Style: Earth Wall Jutsu!" I chanted, glancing down at the ground hopefully. There was a beat of disappointment where nothing seemed to happen - then the chakra resettled, the unfamiliar jutsu worked its magic, and a block of earth _erupted_ out of the ground to smack me in the forehead.

Hissing quietly in pain, I hunched over and contemplated where I had failed. Well, my control had gone awry, clearly, because I'd created more of a brick than a card. It seemed that I had to moderate the amount of chakra I channeled through the second hand seal. Studying the failed card, I also noted that there were a number of bumps along its surface, like Braille marks on a page, that would have made drawing seals on it difficult.

My first three hand seals all needed more work, then. The size of the block indicated that I had flubbed the shaping during the Tiger seal, the force with which it had burst from the ground indicated that I had overpowered the Hare seal, and the bumpiness indicated that I had underpowered the Boar seal.

Sighing and rubbing my forehead, I ran through the seals once again, now spending more time and focus on the Tiger, Hare, and Boar hand seals. In a messy spray of dirt, another slab leapt up, although this time I managed to throw myself out of the way before it bloodied my nose. Examining it, I found that seemed slightly smoother, too, and wasn't nearly as thick. Progress.

Over the next forty-five minutes, I practiced the jutsu. My improvement wasn't prodigious, but it was good, and I found that I had made great strides towards the perfection of my very own Earth Release: Earth Style Card. The cards that emerged were slightly irregular in thickness, varying from paper-thin (which was close to ideal, as the cards had to be capable of inflicting slashes) to wafer-thin, but all my cards leapt to my hands easily and I had little trouble flinging them around.

Once, I managed to throw my card solidly into the trunk of a nearby tree. I cheered for a minute straight.

Additionally, although I couldn't quite get rid of all the bumps on the cards yet, I did manage to relegate them to the edges, shaving them off the faces so that the cards just looked slightly melted and misshapen, like flattened clay.

When I stood up to leave, though, I had to clamp a hand over my mouth and lean against a tree as nausea and weakness washed over me. Caught up in practicing as I was, I'd forgotten that my chakra reserves were far too small to accommodate prolonged usage of a jutsu, even a minor one. They'd definitely be too small right now to last me long fights, especially if I started sealing explosions into my weapons. Naturally, part of the appeal of seal-fighting was that one could reduce the need for chakra reserves by taking previously drawn seals into battle for quick use, but I knew that would never be enough if I wanted to make alterations on the fly. Hopefully, repeated practice sessions for the Earth Style Card would expand my meagre reserves, but I would also likely need to take up some kind of training during other parts of my day.

Given my high intelligence from many years of education in a past life but low strength from only a few years of growth in this one, I probably had a large amount of spiritual energy built up but not a lot of physical energy. If I wanted to increase the total of the chakra available to me, I'd have to train myself physically to match myself spiritually.

Basically, working out would give me more chakra.

On the plus side, since I didn't have to raise both halves independently, but rather bring one up to snuff, my growth in chakra capacity would proceed twice as fast as normal for a while.

On the other hand, I'd have to _exercise_. Oh god, save me now.

In any case, I needed to determine what I would focus on when I trained my body. If I didn't use taijutsu overmuch (perhaps because of an epic Rock Golem), upper body strength and arm strength would be less useful to me than to other shinobi. Instead, it would be smarter to work on my speed and leg strength. This would build up my physical energy (and therefore my chakra), improve my ability to avoid damage, and allow me to maneuver around the battlefield with greater ease.

Mind set, I nodded resolutely and set forth back to my apartment. Sweet, sweet progress.

Halfway through a step, my stomach rumbled and I paused. Ah… Perhaps some sweet, sweet food wouldn't be amiss, either.

* * *

A/N: Here be chapter two. I know that I promised meatier, more exciting chapters, and that this one had only marginally more words and action than the first one, but bear with me here – I'm still setting the scene. Right now, I just wanted to get the Academy's portrayal, a little bit of characterization, and some plotting out of the way. And get glasses-teacher into the picture.

Oh, glasses-teacher. Did somebody say Chekhov's Gunman?

The rest of the Academy years, which I recognize are boring as hell but also important for an understanding of the genin years, should pass fairly quickly from here on out. Expect around 2-4 more chapters of them. After that, you'll get to see the fruits of Tenten's labor. Hooray.

A reviewer asked me how overpowered Tenten was going to be, to which the quick response was: not very. Honestly, Tenten's slow canon growth and serious disposition always made me imagine her as the kind of ninja who worked really hard to compensate for her talent-wise mediocrity – kind of like Rock Lee, only less so. This version of Tenten will have a headstart and the advantage of a unique perspective, so she'll choose a fighting style which derives its power from innovation, preparation, and the clever use of limited resources instead of raw chakra or strength. This will help her remain entirely capable of holding her own as the plot progresses, kind of like Shikamaru, but don't expect her to casually stomp Akatsuki members into the ground or take on Madara single-handedly.

Last, but not least, I'd like to say that I do spend a lot of time thinking about each chapter, but I also know that they are all far from perfect. If you have any suggestions that you think could improve the next one (or the current one, for that matter) please make sure to review or PM me.

\- YSPM


	3. Chapter 3

A/N: This is going to be the last chapter of Poker of the Soul, because (as I should have realized prior to posting) I've handled the structure of my story pretty badly. Normally, I would simply rewrite the story over the course of a month to work better, and then continue on publishing, but then I also looked at the first page of new Naruto stories and saw no less than three self-inserts. Even if my story does a mildly new take on it, I can no longer deny that my story is unoriginal - the one unforgivable sin of fanfiction.

Maybe I'll eventually do a self-insert in a different fandom that is less SI-heavy (Harry Potter, for example, has maybe one good self-insert), but until then I've got other ideas to toy with.

The ideas that spawned this fic will get folded into other fics, but I've still decided to publish this chapter (which, admittedly, is not top-quality, as I would have preferred to edit it another four or five times) for the express purpose of sharing what few ideas are contained therein. If you like them, feel free to use them - if not, I've got a brilliant unclosed plot thread from Naruto I'm planning to explore, and I'll probably include some of them there.

I'll leave the three chapters of this misguided initial foray into fanfiction up, since there are a handful of people who've enjoyed it, but for the most part I'm through here. See you in another fic.

* * *

**Chapter 3: Research and Development**

By the start of our second year, it had become painfully apparent that Rock Lee could not control chakra. The bullying started soon thereafter, and within the week Kato-sensei had pulled Lee aside after class to speak with him. Naturally, I eavesdropped.

It was a common prank among genin who'd learned to tree walk to chakra-stick mundane items to walls, both because it required a lot of control (and therefore bestowed bragging rights) and also because it confused the hell out of civilians. As a result, when I unsealed and stuck a can to the wall of their private classroom, nobody watching bothered to consider that I might be eavesdropping – only pranking.

And I was, in a way, except for the dozen or so meters of string I'd threaded through the bottom and attached to another can, forming a tin can telephone of sorts. It was a fairly clever stealth workaround, if I did say so myself – normally, pressing my ear to the wall for too long would result in Kato-sensei hearing me through the wood and confronting me, but by using a can phone to distance myself I could escape detection. Kicking off, I landed softly in a nearby tree and placed the receiving can to my ear.

"-no chakra," Kato-sensei was saying. "It's suicide is what it is, Lee."

"It is my dream." Lee replied stubbornly.

"I know," Kato-sensei said gently. "Trust me, I know – and as your sensei, I would do anything to see that dream become a reality, but part of growing up means realizing you can't be and do everything you want. I'm sorry you have to find that out now." She was surprisingly compassionate about it, everything considered. In class, her attitude was normally something between disinterest and disdain, but apparently she treated students differently in private.

"But-" Lee faltered, swallowing, before regaining his defiance. "But did not you say on the first day that we could fail all the pre-tests and still become splendid ninja?"

"Yes, I did, but chakra is different." Kato-sensei paused before dropping the bombshell: "A ninja is not a ninja without ninjutsu."

"That is not true!" Lee screamed, as though the words caused him physical pain. "I have known ever since the pre-test that I was not as talented as the other students, but I have always believed that I do not need talent to succeed. I will work hard and prove that I can become a splendid ninja through taijutsu alone!"

Faintly, I heard Lee's footsteps storming out as Kato-sensei called to him, "Wait, Lee!" I smiled fondly at Lee's determination.

Rock Lee was one of my favorite characters, and I always thought he was kind of underappreciated. Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly blasphemous, I would even go so far as to say that the series should have been about him.

I mean, half of Naruto's appeal came from the fact that he started out as the dead last, and yet ended up a hero. His progression over time through blood, sweat, and the wisdom of his teachers felt empowering and uplifting because it was, in a way, a 700-chapter-long rags-to-riches story. But the irony of it all was that Naruto had the deck stacked in his favor from the start: jinchuriki powers, legendary ninja for teachers, prophesied to save the world, son of the Fourth, reincarnation of Asura, and so on.

Lee, on the other hand, couldn't even fucking use chakra. He had no talent in taijutsu, and everything he could do was hard-earned, paid for by the sweat soaking his horrid green jumpsuit. Watching him go from being the kid that the weaklings bully at the Academy to spin-kicking Madara Uchiha in half was… inspiring. If Lee had been born into Neji's prodigal body – or even mine, with my meagre talent – he could have easily ruled the world.

A genius of hard work indeed.

I knew I could never hope to match his intensity or his drive, even at this young age, and that was a little humbling. Neji would always be more talented, and Lee would always work harder, and I would always fall somewhere inbetween them. I just had to find that happy medium that would keep me plot-relevant enough to keep the world in order.

Sighing, I leapt over to the wall, clinging with my feet, and re-sealed my tin can telephone into a small scroll of useful tools.

Sealing was another thing I'd started working on, seeing as I needed to base my entire fighting style around it anyway.

Initially, it was quite difficult. I knew when I started that I wouldn't have a mentor, but I did think I'd be able to find some good scrolls in the library to help me learn. I was wrong. There was not a single scrap of paper in there that so much as mentioned sealing in any kind of practical context. For my research, I had to refer to throwaway details from adventure novels written by ninja and stored in the _civilian_ library, and even those were inconsistent in their depictions.

Still, I did manage to figure a few things out from them, and that was enough for me to reverse-engineer the majority of what I'd need to know.

The first thing I figured out was that sealing was not quite the same as storing. It was _literally_ sealing, like using tape to affix the lid (a seal) to a container (any object). So what actually went into the container?

Easy: chakra. It was like Sasuke spreading his Chidori to his sword, or Shikamaru using Asuma's trench knives for the Shadow Possession – you could imbue objects with jutsu. The only difficulty was that the chakra for those jutsu would get used up over time, as if the objects themselves were performing them. This was sometimes useful, because if the chakra wasn't used the jutsu wouldn't take effect, but if one wanted to release the jutsu at a later time – say, a couple days later – then that dissapation was a downside. In that interest, sealing was invented.

According to an offhand comment by a noble in _The Whirlpool of Malice_, Sealing's humble beginnings started with ninja noticing their chakra lingering ever so slightly in certain places, like around familiar objects or items with sentimental value. Old swords they'd fought with since their childhoods tended to conduct their chakra (and only theirs) better than any others, or else they healing jutsu tended to work more efficiently on family members and close friends. It was small, but noticeable, and researchers began studying the phenomenon in earnest.

The rest of the history I couldn't find, but presumably these researchers discovered that drawing the right symbols could achieve the same effect. Earth jutsu worked way better if you used them with actual earth, for example, but if you recognized this particular collection of squiggles as the kanji for 'earth,' then the chakra for your earth jutsu, as an extension of yourself, would collect there better, too. Add the right shapes – a triskelion here, perhaps a circle there – and you could trap it in there indefinitely, to be released at a later time.

Objects could be sealed in the same way as jutsu through a clever workaround. Much like energy and matter, every object and organism had a corresponding Yin-Yang release jutsu that perfectly recreated it down to the last electron orbital. When the Sage of the Six Paths used it to create the tailed beasts, it was called Creation of All Things. Normal people like me, on the other hand, did not have the Rinnegan, and so we could only "convert" pre-existing objects to and from chakra using the technique. In sealing, that chakra was then poured into paper and then trapped inside.

Thus: kunai in scrolls.

Everything after that, from privacy seals to barrier seals, was simply innovation, trial, and error.

After two months of research, I managed to get the basics all worked out in my head, and so I started practicing. At the time, my only real usable jutsu was my card jutsu, so I started with sealing that into paper.

It took me ages. At first, I couldn't even get my chakra to enter the seal. A break to practice tree walking solved that quickly, but then my chakra refused to stay in the seal, even when I held onto it. I didn't dare attempt water walking for fear of drowning, but by just keeping at it for a week, feeding chakra into a pocket of leaves during class and drawing seals with stolen pen and paper in the park during the evenings, I slowly gained the ability to hold an Earth Card Jutsu in a piece of paper – so long as I was touching it, anyway. I only needed to figure out the right seals so I could take the hand away and still not have an earth card emerge to slash my nose off.

I tried copying what I'd already seen – nonsense designs with some related kanji tossed in here or there – but that didn't work too well. It settled like water in a paper bowl, and leaked very much the same way. The problem, as I figured out, was firstly that it wasn't personalized enough for me, and secondly that kanji and the like held a shared cultural meaning among most ninja, but not me.

It was why whole villages had distinct sealing styles - everybody born and raised in the ninja world immediately associated this collection of squiggly lines with 'earth' and saw the swastika as a religious symbol of good luck, but then somebody from Uzushiogakure might see a whirlpool in the spiral a Konoha ninja drew. Even more importantly, as somebody from another universe, I knew the earth by multiple names and associated the swastika with Hitler and nazism. I could only partially tap into those shared cultural meanings and values that caused everybody's seals to look similar.

To get the full effect, I had to dust off the memories of my old life.

So I wrote the kanji for earth in the center, but underneath it I placed the corresponding English word, and around both I drew a simple circle – for containment. Lining the circle were little nonsense squiggles that came to me as I freely dragged my pen around, which I then surrounded with blocky little rock-like shapes. It was crude and imperfect, but it held for upwards of an hour, and that was all that counted. I had something to improve upon.

As I did so, I also began developing other seals. Seals turned out to be ridiculously versatile for such a simple concept. Within a couple weeks of perfecting my earth seal, I had already come up with dozens of ideas. Most were stupid, but some were clever enough that I was able to sell them on the streets for a tidy profit.

My first clever innovation was a warmth tag. I learned a minor fire jutsu over the course of a week and then spent another week working out how to put it into a tag. By smudging the corner of the seal just so, I could make it leak out so slowly it acted like a body heater – perfect for a district full of underdressed women on cold nights.

Then, after swiping a sheet of blank name tags and a pen from the Academy, I mass-produced them and sold them under a disguise for ten ryo each. They were gone in a couple hours, and I was left 500 ryo (roughly fifty bucks) richer.

From there, I started coming up with other, better ideas, because I still had to pay off those initial loans, as well as the rent on my apartment, and the odd jobs I'd been taking before were simply not enough. For people who needed to defend themselves, I made a 100 ryo Earth Pillar seal that could be stored in a wallet and torn in half to send a ten-foot-pole flying at the assailant. My lantern tags, which absorbed light during the day and released it at night, were also pretty popular, as were my recording seals, which (to simplify things immensely) captured and released sound.

My seal-selling business was bustling and lucrative. The only downside, of course. was that it attracted too much attention.

* * *

There was something beautiful about a weapon, I decided as I carefully eyed the one resting under my chin. It was a single-edged tanto about twenty-five centimeters in length with a meticulously engraved hilt, which was strange because it was quite poorly taken care of. The chipping along the edge showed that its owner didn't know how to use it in the slightest – regular, non-ANBU tantos don't have particularly strong bellies, which means they wear easily when slashing. In exchange, though, they tend to be ridiculously sturdy when piercing stuff. This guy clearly didn't know that, and had simply gone about slicing willy-nilly.

The blade was probably inherited or stolen, then. Certainly not made for him, as he didn't seem to respect its purpose or utility in the slightest. And yet, resting against my neck, it was also the only thing that had prevented me from beating him into a quivering paste.

Weapons were, in that way, the ultimate equalizers. Often, you didn't even need to know how to use them, but the implied threat associated with simply holding one was powerful enough to subdue your betters.

I made a mental note to find some good weapons myself.

"I'm sure we can work something out, Wakako-sama," I said calmly, deciding to try for diplomacy. "I have discovered a fairly lucrative income source recently, and provided another month or two I could pay the remainder of my debts off."

She sighed and held out her cup. A faceless underling rushed over to fill it with sake. "Perhaps I would have believed you a couple months ago, Tenten." She took a swig. "Back then, despite your identity being hidden by your obvious transformation jutsu – oh, don't think I couldn't tell – I knew you intended on paying me back. But after four months of you only barely keeping the interest under control, I've grown somewhat… impatient."

At this, she flicked her wrist and sent the empty cup flying past my face, shattering it on the wall of my apartment before I could catch it. The pieces fell loosely to the ground below as Wakako stretched out her arm lazily and grabbed another chipped cup from my shelf. She inspected it distastefully. "Have you no good cups in this place, girl?"

My lips quirked into a wry smile. "I'm afraid not, Wakako-sama. Perhaps you shouldn't have ambushed me in my apartment if cups were your primary concern." She gave a dry chuckle at that.

"Indeed," she said, "but I wanted us to ditch with the pretenses, and this is the only place we could reliably catch you without your disguise up. Now, normally we would have beaten you up a little and then given you another month before we slit your throat as a warning to the rest of our customers. Thing is, though, I headed out into the streets under my own disguise a week ago and bought this interesting seal from a street vendor. It was a clever thing that let me record conversations, and it has proven useful in uncovering some disloyal rats in my employ.

"I figured I might as well acquire the seal maker for myself, so I followed the guy to his house the next time I saw him out peddling lantern seals and shit. Imagine my surprise when he walked into the same room as one of the sleazy flakes who owes me money – and then, as I watched through a crack in the door, slipped off his disguise and became a tiny little slip of a girl. Sounding familiar?"

"I don't see what-" I started, but she cut me off.

"None of that bullshit. I'm not going to kill you or beat you up because you're seven, and because you're useful, but I'm not going to let you off the hook, either – I have a reputation to maintain. So you're going to come work for me, or I'm going to change my mind and have Fumio there peel you like an orange."

I glanced down at the knife pressed to my throat and considered. "You do realize that I am an Academy student, correct? My death would probably be investigated when I didn't show up for class."

"Kid, I thought you were smart. Who the fuck do you think I am?" She drained the last of her new cup and held it out for her underling to refill. "There's a reason I run the Shoryu-kai, one of the only truly successful organized criminal enterprises in the nest of ninjas known as Konoha. Trust me when I say that no wet-behind-the-ears chunin would ever find your corpse."

She was probably right, I mused. It wasn't generally a good idea to get tied up with the yakuza, but it was too late now to back out. Maybe I could have avoided it earlier, but it was definitely too late now.

"Fine," I said eventually. "When do I start?"

"Not so hasty, Ten-chan," She grinned this feral smirk at me, and I shivered slightly. A thin slice appeared on my skin as I involuntarily brushed up against the cold blade, but I didn't dare raise my hand to feel it. Wakako's smirk widened. "I haven't explained the terms of the job yet."

"So what are they?" I ventured cautiously.

"Well first, my men will collect any money you've managed to earn." She snapped with her left hand and a man with red scarf wrapped around his mouth left to rifle through my possessions. "After that, though, I'll waive whatever's left over. Go nuts." She held out her cup as if toasting me, and I wondered how she wasn't drunk yet. Perhaps she'd brought water instead of sake. "In return, you're going to work for me without pay until you graduate from the Academy."

"Do I have to join the yakuza?" I asked quietly.

"Nah," she said, laughing a little. "Wouldn't wish that kind of life upon a kid – especially not a smart one like you. You'll go far one day with a head like yours, so long as you keep it on your shoulders, so I'd probably feel a bit guilty tying you down. Consider yourself an unpaid consultant or something."

Well, that was good. Leaving the yakuza could sometimes be very costly, often to the price of a pinky or two. At least I knew I wouldn't incur any harsh penalties when this was all over and done.

"And I assume that if I tell anybody about you-" I started, but Wakako cut me off.

"-they will never find your corpse, yes." She smirked. "Any other questions?"

"No." I shook my head.

"Alright, then," she said, leaping to her feet and gesturing for her goon to sheathe his tanto. Her other goon, the one with the scarf, returned with a fistful of bills I'd been keeping under the bed. "For now, I want to get the full measure of your capabilities. In one week, make me a shock tag that I can modulate the output of. Don't fail me, or there will be consequences." With that, she tossed back the rest of her sake and flicked the empty cup at me over her shoulder. I fumbled a bit and caught it just barely by the tips of my fingers. "See you later, Ten-chan."

And with that, she and her goons left. I let out a shuddering breath of relief I didn't know I'd been holding back before collapsing into a sitting position on the floor.

What the fuck had I gotten myself into?

* * *

The next day, I tore off a small strip from my sheet and wore it around my neck to hide the healing cut. It looked awkward, but nobody asked any uncomfortable questions, so I didn't mind. I'd only have to wear it for a couple days, anyway.

I needed a weapon, and fast. Wakako was the only loan shark I hadn't been able to pay off, but if I was getting involved with her business I needed something to defend myself. That meant I needed more money.

It always came back to money, and how little I had. Even my seal business was nothing compared to the regular salary of a genin, who could easily bring in upwards of 5000 ryo after a hard day's work. I couldn't wait to become a ninja.

…Well, maybe I could. Death and destruction and all that jazz still weighed heavily on my mind, after all. The paycheck would certainly help, though.

But for now, I had to figure out the shock seal, so after school I headed back to the library and started searching for jutsu.

My nature type was probably earth, judging by how much easier that card jutsu was to learn than any of the fire ones I tried for my warmth tags. Chances were that Wakako knew that, which was precisely why she'd assigned a shock tag to me – lightning, after all, was the weakness of earth.

I had a very difficult time learning it. I lamented my lack of talent often, but it still only took me a week or so to learn most basic jutsu, and my analytical skills let me grasp the principles behind complex techniques much faster than other students. None of that applied to lightning jutsu. Using them, I felt like King Canute commanding the tide to rise – except that King Canute was intentionally demonstrating his powerlessness against the forces of nature to his advisors, whereas I was still trying my hardest to control them.

And yet I did not give up, for fear of the "consequences" Wakako spoke of.

So I worked hard, day in and day out, running through the hand seals under my desk in class until I could do them without thinking and channeling lightning chakra until I felt ready to vomit. Still, five days passed and I could barely bring sparks to the tips of my fingers. It wasn't enough.

I gave up and turned back to my ingenuity, the one strength I could always rely upon. Perhaps I couldn't generate a single shock strong enough to fry a person, but I could compound a ton of tiny charges until the voltage produced upon releasing the seal was strong enough to accomplish the task.

I skipped school the next day to draw the seal. To absorb multiple charges, the seal would need a continuous absorption factor, so I modeled it on my flashlight and recording seals. From there, I worked on modifying the conversion elements and upgrading the efficiency, which in turn improved the storage capacity.

But that was all work I'd done before, so it was easy to figure out what pattern to use and what symbols to draw. The hard part was modulating the release.

I simply couldn't. All my seals were meant to be used once and then discarded, like the earth pillar seal, or else trickle out their contents at a constant rate, like the warmth seal. Each on their own was conceptually easy, but I could not find a middle ground between constant emission and a single-use burst.

I did not have any sudden flashes of inspiration until months later, but I created a basic workaround with the four hours I had left until Saturday evening, when Wakako would burst into my house.

I created five seals.

Four were "trickle shock seals" which, like the warmth seal, would emit a steady stream of electricity. The fifth was a "containment" seal would block off any number of the shock seals desired based on the amount of chakra poured into it.

The finished result was a compound seal with only four settings – five, if you counted the "off" setting – which would not be recharched or reused, and which did not last particularly long. But it worked.

Wakako's expression was inscrutable when she saw the finished result. "Have you tested it?" I rolled back my left sleeve tiredly to reveal a small burn on forearm, before shaking my arm and letting the sleeve fall back down again. "Good enough. Come with me."

She hadn't brought any underlings this time, so I suppose she considered me sufficiently intimidated. She even treated me to coffee – imagine that. "You'll want to be awake for what I'm about to show you," was all she would say when I joked about her change of heart.

Thing is, though, I'm not sure I did.

The first thing that I noticed was the caked dirt and blood painting the room a dull, splotchy brown. Then I smelled it through the walls, that kind of decaying vomit and dried urine smell that could never quite be washed from a room. My vision blurred and I gagged, but Wakako forcibly lifted my gaze back up by my hair. That's when I saw him.

Even behind the one-way mirror, I could feel his glare on me. Accusatory and dark, it pierced my conscience, and I realized through my unaccountable guilt that this was probably the "rat" Wakako had so casually referenced in our apartment negotiations. The one my recording tags had helped her discover and capture.

I felt sick. People talk all the time about their traumatic first kills, but here was mine – an accident. I had inadvertently brought him here, and I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn't leaving this room alive. He could tell, too, if his posture was any indication: he was hunched over, his back curved in an arc of helplessness, anchored to the chair by his bound arms. There was no defiant struggle in his thinning limbs any longer, for it had left him with the streams of blood that dried upon his body.

And yet his gaze was strong. Not hopeful, but strong, and resentful. The sheer force of it kept my breath locked in my chest next to my hammering heart; shuddering, I forced myself to exhale and then asked the only question that seemed capable of traversing my blank mind: "Are you going to…"

Her grim face twisted somewhat, and then Wakako nodded sharply. "Yes. Watch closely."

She walked into the room. This time I did not avert my eyes.

She wore a lightly affable mask as she delicately picked her way across the grime and blood staining the floor. "So nice to see you again, Takeshi. I would offer you some sake, but I do think we'll both want to be sober for this."

He turned to face her, his mouth curving into a snarl around his bloodsoaked cloth gag.

"Tut, tut, Takeshi. That's no way to treat your betters." She casually backhanded him across the face and then walked over to the corner of the room, disappearing from my view. When she reappeared, she was dragging a chair over to her victim. She sat in front of him. "I presume you have not changed your mind?"

Never once taking his eyes away from hers, he slowly shook his head.

"A pity. And I am so curious as to what you told those charming fellows over at the Konoha Police Force." Wakako shook her head sadly. "This song and dance is growing quite old, dear friend. I know you long to die. Please tell me what I need to know so I can grant that wish."

Takeshi closed his eyes and looked away.

"Very well. I am sorry for what I must do to you, but you have brought this upon yourself." She drew out my compound tag from her pocket and stuck it to his back with chakra. His eyes widened fearfully and he mumbled something into his gag. "You can hardly complain now, Takeshi," Wakako murmured in response.

She made a hand seal and I felt her pour her chakra into the seal. It _pulsed_, and he screamed. I covered my ears, but it did not help. I could feel it reverberating through my bones.

When he stopped, and Wakako peeled off the seal, it tore a small amount of burnt skin with it. She eyed it distastefully before tossing it into the corner, right where Takeshi would see it.

Calmly, she then untied his gag and asked him clearly, "Do you have anything you want to say to me?"

He sat there silently for perhaps a minute, his body twitching every now and then, but eventually he rasped out a warning. "The police… They will find me. They will find you."

"Perhaps. But you will be long dead by then." She moved to gag him again, but he asked another question before she could.

"…The girl outside. Who is she?"

I gasped. He could sense me – a ninja, then.

"A victim – and one far less lucky than you." She re-gagged him, and then left.

As we exited the unmarked warehouse, she remarked to me, "I brought you here for a reason."

Numbly, I asked, "So you could traumatize me for life?"

"So you could see what you're getting yourself into," She said. "Not all your seals will be used for purposes like this, but some will. If you can't live with that, you may as well tell me now so I can dispose of you painlessly – and not like poor Takeshi in there."

I continued to walk alongside her, silently and deep in thought. "Are the police coming?" I asked finally.

"No. He was a member – not an Uchiha, of course – but we faked his death too well. They will never find him."

"And you choose not to tell him because…?"

"He was a good friend." She sighed and closed her eyes tiredly. "I want him to die assured of his own revenge. Even if it is a lie."

What a strange world it all was. So bloody and cruel and honorable. After Wakako dropped me off at my house, I vomited into the sink, and then cried myself to sleep. Then I woke up, bought an armful of newspapers, and cut out a letter to the police.

I couldn't include anything that she'd shown only me, for that would give me away, but I told them enough. Wakako wasn't a careless woman, so she'd tried to intimidate me by showing me the consequences of betrayal. She underestimated my foolhardiness.

* * *

By the next Academy school year, I saw dark circles hanging from her sharp eyes. Her gaze, once confident and strong, darted over every shadow three or four times before she would relax even a little. She started coming to me often, sometimes several times in a month, demanding new seals for an absurd variety of purposes.

Then, I started to hear things just by living in the Red Light district. They seemed normal, even commonplace. I would go in the morning to buy that kusarigama I'd been eyeing, and the blacksmith would tell me how Shima's son turned up dead with stab wounds yesterday. Then, on the way to school, I would see the charred remains of the bakery that had burned down last week. Maybe on the way home I'd witness a police ninja take in a couple hooligans for racketeering the shop they coincidentally happened to be eating at.

Every month I left another letter on the steps of the police headquarters. Most people saw disconnected coincidences, but I could see a war waged silently on the streets of Konoha. The police were winning.

* * *

Then, all of sudden, they weren't.

It was a Tuesday. I woke up two hours late and rushed to class, but the exertion taxed me, and so I wrenched open the classroom door a gasping and sweating mess. Into the shocked silence, I wheezed, "Sorry for being late. I, uh, got lost."

A soft chuckle gathered slowly in the back of the room before spreading suddenly, blanketing the class in obnoxious peals of laughter.

"Hey, Hairbuns! Just how lost did you get? You're an hour late!" One of the kids jeered inbetween laughs.

"Yeah!" Another concurred. "Stupid! We're right under the Hokage monument!"

I blushed – not that anybody could tell, with how flushed I already was from the exercise. Kato-sensei fixed me with a sharp glare before shrugging imperceptibly and making this lazy gesture with her right hand. "Quiet down, brats. Late kid, take a seat somewhere and meet me after class."

I looked around for an empty seat and noticed there were two – odd, considering we had thirty chairs for thirty students. Looking closer, I realized that the empty seat, which was positioned close to the front, normally belonged to Hiroto Uchiha. Shrugging, I made for the other one and sat there.

After class, I stayed behind and spoke with Kato-sensei.

"Tenten, where were you the night before?" She asked gently.

I looked up into her eyes and told the truth: "Training."

She quirked an eyebrow but didn't push the matter. Instead, she sighed and walked over to collect her papers. As she gathered them in her arms, she said, "I don't know why you overslept, but if you saw something and couldn't sleep…" She stopped and rubbed her eyes with her thumb and middle finger before turning and granting me a tired smile. "You can always talk to us, Tenten."

And that was when I realized it.

Back in America, three hundred or so people being slaughtered would have sparked national outrage. Media coverage would have dragged on for months and months as the president was called upon to change the fundamental problems with America that led to the disaster. Demonstrations would have erupted into the streets, perhaps accompanied by riots, perhaps fueled by incitations for war. The conspiracy theories alone would've lasted for decades.

But in Konoha, we did not blink at three hundred deaths. We barely wept. Our disasters showed themselves in the shadows on our brows and in the soft suspicion that settled into our lives.

It made me remember the final lines of a famous poem: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang, but with a whimper." That was kind of the way things went down with the Uchiha clan, revered and resented by the entire village: three hundred strong, with a hundred of the best ninja in the village, and they simply didn't show up one day.

In the aftermath, the fangirls gravitated over to Neji instead. One of the wannabe brats whose talent ranked slightly above Lee (and whose focus ranked slightly below Shikamaru) took the empty seat within the week. A new student moved in within the month and quietly filled the last empty chair.

And we carried on.

I had always expected Hiroto to die, albeit not for another year, but I still wasn't prepared for the waves of guilt that accompanied his death.

He was never an important person to me, of course. I was not so stupid as to get close to somebody I knew was marked for death. But he put a face on disaster.

It was a daunting task to quell rebellion and save a clan. Much less so to save a child.

I wandered aimlessly through the streets one day after class and somehow ended up at the memorial stone by training ground three.

Hiroto was an Academy student, so he wasn't a ninja yet, and his name would never be carved on the stone. But because so many of the corpses were left unrecognizable, and because so many more would have no close relations to identify them, I also knew that I would probably never find his body in the graveyard.

I sat down by the stone and searched where his name should have been. Ninety-eight from the Uchiha clan had been ninja, and so ninety-eight fresh names had been carved onto the stone in alphabetical order. I stared at the space between "Uchiha Haruko" and "Uchiha Ichiro" and contemplated where I could have changed the past.

I had decided not to stop the massacre because I knew that more people would likely die in the uprising it had prevented, because I knew I could not stop later attempts to wipe out the clan, and because their deaths were central to the plot.

But all those excuses tasted bitter as I turned them over in my mouth.

Maybe I couldn't have saved the whole clan, sure, but what about the children – like Hiroto? What about the civilians? I could have surely figured out the date ahead of time and worked to ensure a few Uchiha were at my house (or more likely somebody else's) on some pretense when the extermination proceeded.

Would Obito have really worked to kill them, too? Would they have turned against Konoha? Or would they have become invaluable assets in improving the future, perhaps keeping Sasuke from fighting Naruto quite so many times?

I didn't know. I would never know. The moment for change was gone, and I would only ever be allowed now to wallow in my own regret and cowardice as I stared at the place where Hiroto's name should have been carved, and also where it should never be carved.

I stood and turned to go, a wordless vow lingering at the edges of my consciousness.

The Konoha Military Police Force, headed and staffed primarily by Uchiha, collapsed, and soon the dark circles faded from around Wakako's sharp eyes.


End file.
